Hong Kong polling site suffers massive DDoS attack

An online polling site intended to gauge the support for universal suffrage in Hong Kong was hit by a large distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack Tuesday.

Created by the University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong Polytechnic University, popvote.hk is intended to measure the support for a grassroots movement known as Occupy Central, which looks to bring universal suffrage to the country.

The project was nearly derailed by a strong DDoS attack that flooded the site with traffic, according to a report by The South China Morning Post. Security and site performance service provider CloudFlare assisted in mitigating the attack. According to Matthew Prince, CEO at CloudFlare, the malicious traffic was hailing from the Amazon Web Services cloud.

While the sources of the attack have not been identified, reports speculate that the Chinese government is involved.